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Riothamus comments on Meme: Valuable Vulnerability - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: scarcegreengrass 27 June 2016 11:54PM

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Comment author: Riothamus 01 July 2016 05:27:04PM 1 point [-]

Military bonding is an interesting comparison. Training in a professional military relies on shared suffering to build a strong bond between the members of a unit. If we model combat as an environment so extreme that vulnerability is inescapable, the function of vulnerability as a bonding trait makes sense.

It also occurs to me that we almost universally have more control over how we signal emotions than how we feel them. The norm would therefore be that we feel more emotions than we show; by being vulnerable and signaling our emotions, other people can empathize instinctively and may feel greater security as a result.